Virtual Oil Rig – Enhancing Higher Education

A poster of the work on the RGU Virtual Oil Rig and related educational experiences to enhance learning and training for offshore oil rig workers was presented at the 3rd International Enhancement in Higher Education Conference: Inspiring Excellence – Transforming the Student Experience. This was run on 6th-8th Jun 2017 at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Glasgow, UK under the auspices of the The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, UK. The poster was presented by project leader Jo-Anne Tait, a Senior Lecturer and Head of Teaching and Learning in the School of Engineering at Robert Gordon University (RGU), Aberdeen, UK.

Colin Hetherington in the Oil & Gas Centre at RGU created the 3D models used in the virtual oil rig and simulators and created an OpenSimulator region on which they were housed. An associated “Campus Area” to support training on the virtual oil rig built upon the Open Virtual Collaboration Environment 3D assets created on the OpenVCE programme led by Austin Tate at the University of Edinburgh and that was part of the that was part of the US Army Research Laboratory’s Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE) programme.

Austin Tate ported the virtual oil rig and related models into other OpenSimulator grids (see this related blog post), experimented with Oculus Rift VR experiences (see this blog post) and transferred the environment via the OAR Converter to Unity3D and later into online multi-user collaborative environments such as Sine Space.

The Robert Gordon University Oil and Gas Centre Oil Rig mesh-rich demonstration OpenSim Archive (OAR) by Colin Hetherington has been mounted on a region on OSGrid provided on Vue (the Virtual University of Edinburgh) servers … and an image is one of the splash screens that show on the OSGrid web site and on the viewer log in page.

It can be accessed via hop://login.osgrid.org/Oil%20Rig/122/114/42

Oil Rig region on Sinespace

The RGU Oil Rig region using Colin Hetherington’s meshes has been converted from OpenSim via OAR Converter into Unity3D and then used as the basis for the Sinespace Oil Rig region…